Holly T Books

but the sky’s wearing October.

My interpretation

Slow down to listen✨

If it's your first time listening to his show, you are doing yourself a disservice. So run it all thee way back for an inspiring, mind-stimulating collection. 🔥🔥🔥

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Reposted from @ethicallyimmoral Volume Three: Chapter Nineteen of the Podcast is now available. This week we welcome Life Coach, Poet, Spoken Word Artist, podcast host, and Author of the book Lunar Honey, Holly Toomer (@bellewoodz).

Recorded Spoken Word performances featured in this Chapter include:

TJ Dema (@tjdema) - Dreams

Shanelle Gabriel (@shanellegabriel) - performance from her appearance in Volume Three: Chapter Four

Meccamorphosis (@meccamorphosis) - Weird Science

Gina Loring (@ginastarlight) - My Black is the Color of Sunshine

You can listen to the podcast by clicking the link in our bio, by visiting our website www.ethicallyimmoralpodcast.com, and/or via all podcast platforms

- Belle ❤

A long awaited day.

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in the discomfort

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of feeling fear

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and doing it anyway.

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- Belle 💋

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I believe silence is an art.  Deciphering when the use of silence is appropriate is truly subjective, so it commands us to be creative.  Whether the effort is conscious or not—and unconscious creativity is a fun topic, but we can save that for another day.

The use of silence poses some questions:

Where will it be placed, if placed?

For how long?

Is there a pattern?  

What do we wish to accomplish with it?

As a writer or poet, the answers to these questions may come naturally to you but let’s venture off of the writing pad.

As an individual, are you usually comforted by silence, or do you find it to sometimes be unsettling?

In circumstances, when does silence make the most sense to you?  When could it be detrimental?  

I’ve grown to believe that love seeks to understand first.  I’ve also grown to believe that two seemingly inconsistent feelings can exist at the same time.  

Coming across perspectives that dismiss mental health issues, is tough. Particularly, when you have suffered yourself or when someone you love has but especially, when in either case, it has been dismissed.  

It is unfortunate that dishonesty does exist even around this, but I think we can be better with how we respond to or act around these issues.  Society commonly places “public figures” on pedestals as if we are not the same species that came from the same God.  

Even if one is unable to feel empathy, or compassion…perhaps, ask more questions to understand, from a genuine place, so that you may increase your consciousness around it.  You can be mad at someone’s decision, sad at it, disappointed or even annoyed.  Feel how you feel and that is ok.  But know that if you can feel whatever you feel and be valid, maybe try not to invalidate someone else.

This week I wanted to read you an excerpt from a study done by David Xiang and Alisha Yi, titled “A Look Back and a Path Forward: Power during the Pandemic.”

You can find this in the Journal of Medical Humanities and I will include the link in this post to the NCBI article. For anyone who is not familiar NCBI stands for National Center for Biotechnology Information

The article states:

“Poetry creates avenues for self-expression that cannot be felt through other means of communication. This in itself can be a healing and restorative process, a self-guided therapy that allows us to strengthen our mental health and connection to ourselves, and to those around us.”

I’d love to hear your thoughts and if you are a witness to poetry therapy?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7447694/#

Xiang, D. H., & Yi, A. M. (2020). A Look Back and a Path Forward: Poetry's Healing Power during the Pandemic. The Journal of medical humanities, 41(4), 603–608. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-020-09657-z